CHAPTER XI
Archaeologists of a future age will doubtless, in their minute explorations of this region, come upon the petrified remains of golf balls in such number as will occasion learned dispute. Found so profusely and yet so far from any known course, they will perhaps give rise to wholly erroneous surmises. Prefacing his paper with a reference to lost secrets once possessed by other ancients, citing without doubt that the old Egyptians knew how to temper the soft metal of copper, a certain scientist will profoundly deduce from this deposit of balls, far from the vestiges of the nearest course, that people of this remote day possessed the secret of driving a golf ball three and a half miles, and he will perhaps moralize upon the degeneracy of his own times, when the longest drive will doubtless not exceed a scant mile.
For three days Sharon sprayed out over the landscape, into ideal golf-ball covert, where many forever eluded even the keen eyes of Wilbur Cowan, one hundred balls originally purchased by the selecter golfing set of Newbern. Hereupon he refused longer to regard the wooden driver as a possible instrument of precision, and forever renounced it. Elihu Titus heard him renounce it balefully in the harness room one late afternoon, and later entering that apartment found the fragments of a shattered driver.
It remained for Wilbur Cowan to bring Sharon into the game by another avenue. A new campaign was entered upon, doubtfully at first by Sharon, at length with dawning confidence. He was never to touch a wooden club. He was to drive with an iron, not far, but truly; to stay always in the centre of the fairway and especially to cultivate the shorter approach shots and the use of the putter. The boy laboured patiently with his pupil, striving to persuade him that golf was more than a trial of strength. From secret lessons back of the stable they came at length to furtive lessons over the course at hours when it was least played. John Knox McTavish figured at these times as consulting expert.
"It's th' shor-r-t game that tells th' stor-r-r-y," said John; and Sharon, making his whole game a short game, was presently telling the story understandably, to the vast pride of the middle man who provided endless balls for his lessons.
It was a day of thrills for them both when Rapp, Senior, publicly challenged and accepting with dreams of an easy conquest, bent down before the craft of Sharon Whipple. Sharon, with his competent iron in a short half-arm swing—he could not, he said, trust the utensil beyond the tail of his eye—sent the ball eighteen times not far but straight, and with other iron shots coaxed it to the green, where he sank it with quite respectable putting. Rapp, Senior, sliced his long drives brilliantly into shaded grassy dells and scented forest glades, where he trampled scores of pretty wild flowers as he chopped his way out again. Rapp, Senior, made the course excitingly in one hundred and thirty-eight; Sharon Whipple, playing along safe and sane lines, came through with one hundred and thirty-five, and was a proud man, and looked it, and was still so much prouder than he looked that he shuddered lest it get out on him. Later he vanquished, by the same tactics, other men who used the wooden driver with perfect form in practice swings.
Contests in which he engaged, however, were likely to be marred by regrettable asperities rising from Sharon's inability to grasp the nicer subtleties of golf. It seemed silly to him not to lift his ball out of some slight depression into which it had rolled quite by accident; not to amend an unhappy lie in a sand trap; and he never came to believe that a wild swing leaving the ball untouched should be counted as a stroke. People who pettishly insisted upon these extremes of the game he sneeringly called golf lawyers. When he said that he made a hole in nine, he meant nine or thereabouts—approximately nine; nice people, he thought, should let it go at that. So he became feared on the course, not only for his actual prowess but for his matchless optimism in casting up his score. He was a pleased man, and considered golf a good game; and he never forgot that Wilbur Cowan had made him the golfer he was. More than ever was he believing that Harvey D. Whipple had chosen wrongly from available Cowans. On the day when he first made the Newbern course in, approximately, one hundred and twenty—those short-arm iron shots were beginning to lengthen down the centre of the fairway—he was sure of it.